November 2012

There were 3 posts published in November 2012 (this is page 1 of 1).

R.I.P Fictionwise

On Friday morning I received a sad email: Fictionwise is shutting down.

Back in the early 2000s (does that decade have a pronounceable name yet?) I took my trusty Rocket eBook Reader everywhere. There weren’t a lot of options to legitimately buy ebooks back then, but Fictionwise was among the first. They specialized in sci-fi, and I bought tons of short stories from them by moderately well known authors. Usually they cost less than $1, and were often DRM-free. Yes, Fictionwise was ahead of it’s time in some interesting ways. I looked forward to buying a digital version of the sci-fi magazine Analog every month, and grabbed an occasional novel too.

As I shifted more of my reading to ebooks, Fictionwise didn’t really meet my needs anymore. Their selection was never the greatest, though I knew that if they had what I wanted it was almost always at the cheapest price around. And in a move unheard of at other ebook retailers, they offered regular coupons. I bought something there as recently as October 2011, by which point the site was a shell of it’s former self.

Barnes & Noble bought Fictionwise in early 2009, and left the site largely untouched ever since. I’m not sure what they did with the store, but I’d guess it was a staff acquisition. Whatever happened, Fictionwise’s customer support dropped off a cliff. They took more than two weeks to get back to me when that 2011 ebook purchase had major issues in the text. Time pretty much stopped for their site – it still has the exact same design I remember from 2003.

While my good memories outweigh the bad, it’s time for Fictionwise to go. B&N is shutting them down, and allowing users to transfer most of their Fictionwise purchases to a Nook library. Only one of my dozens of titles have made the transition so far, but I’m assured more will follow. And I’ve got backups of them all, so I’m not worried. Still, there’s a lengthy list of Fictionwise titles which won’t be transferred to a Nook library. If you owned one of those, they’ll just be gone.

This is the first semi-major ebook store shutdown that I’ve personally experienced as a customer. Despite the backup and transfer options available, I still find it disturbing that my library can up and disappear.

I do salute B&N for handling the shutdown relatively well, and wish them the best.

Format rot in ebook preservation

Electronic text is hard to preserve. This might seem counter-intuitive – isn’t it trivially easy to make backup copies? Yes, but accessing those copies is another matter.

I’ve been cleaning out the darker recesses of my office lately, digging through things accumulated by previous occupants back to the mid 80s. I knew I was playing host to a large quantity of floppy discs (both 3.5″ and 5.25″), but this is the first time I looked at what’s actually on them.

I found seven ebooks (the labels call some “Hypercard novels”) in that pile of 3.5″ floppies. Most were published by a company called Eastgate. Eastgate still sells copies of these titles ebooks to this day, but I’m not clear how they’re supposed to be read.

I’ve run into 4 barriers in trying to read these ebooks:

  1. They’re on floppy disks. Floppy drives are a dying breed. Luckily these are 3.5″ disks, because if they’d been 5.25″ I wouldn’t have access to the right-sized drive. Still, in another five years any floppy drive at all will be considered specialized legacy equipment.
  2. The disks are mac-only. No PC that I’ve found has been able to read them.
  3. Even on modern macs, they can’t be read. I haven’t had time to fully figure out why, but some preliminary research pointed out that they might be a special kind of floppy disk that only older mac drives can read. Modern ones won’t work.
  4. Even if I had the right kind of drive – what software will they need to be read? I have no idea, but I’d bet money that it’s nothing still in common use today.

Like I said Eastgate still exists, and sells copies of these ebooks. They were evidently were migrated to CD-ROM at some point. But even with those more modern copies, the Eastgate website says some of their titles require Hypercard to be read. Hypercard was mac-only software, and stopped working with current versions of OSX in 2005. And even if I was somehow able to get Hypercard to run, I’d still be forced to re-buy the content on CD-ROM.

I have no idea if these ebooks are any good, or hold any value at all beyond being curiosities of early ebook publishing. I’m not going to put any more effort into getting them running unless I’m given a compelling reason. But this is a real issue, and one that will only become more important in time. I think of the huge quantities of CD & DVD resources we still have at work, and I shudder a bit. Apple removed the CD-ROM drive from the latest imac, and other manufacturers can’t be far behind.

If anything, this experience has drilled into my head that I need to keep an eye out for mission critical resources on old formats. I’ll migrate them forward when I can, but that won’t always be possible. I’m bullish on ebooks in general, but when it comes to preservation paper still wins.

Side note: Here’s a list of the titles I have on floppy. Maybe these are crucially important to someone else. If you’ve got the means, I’ve got the media:

  • Ambulance: An Electronic Novel, by Monica Moran
  • King of Space – by Sarah Smith
  • The Perfect Couple – by Clark Humphrey
  • Quibbling – by Carolyn Guyer
  • Afternoon, a Story – by Joyce Michael
  • Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse – by John McDald
  • Its name was Penelope – by Judy Malloy (this disk appears to be signed)

Review: Kindle Paperwhite

Based on shipping time alone, the Kindle Paperwhite seems to be a huge success.  There’s currently a 5-7 week lead time on ordering one, which makes it already iffy even for a Christmas gift.  But if you’re shopping for an ebook reader this season, the Paperwhite is the one to get.This is my third Kindle, after leaving #2 on a plane (which I still kick myself for), and the paperwhite has a series of refinements that have been a long time coming.

The most visible addition is the lit screen.  Previous Kindles offered add-on cases which included a light, but this is right in the device itself.  It’s bright enough to read in the dark, but also dim enough to let my wife sleep next to me while I read.  There’s a slight shadowing effect at the bottom of the screen, but it only bugged me for a minute or two before I learned to ignore it.

Less visible but equally welcome is the capacitive touchscreen.  Previous models used IR to detect taps, which was sometimes inaccurate or frustrating to use.  The difference is subtle, but the results are much more responsive.  And while I don’t pretend to know the technical reasons behind this, the Paperwhite’s screen also seems to repel smudges and dust better than the previous model’s did.

The Kindle home screen & menus received their first overhaul ever, and it’s a welcome arrival.  Cover images now feature prominently instead of just text, and overall it’s a easier to navigate around.  That said, I’m annoyed that roughly 1/3 of the home screen is taken up by a display of popular books available for purchase.  And this is on the model that supposedly has no ads.

Now the smaller improvements:

One of my pet peeves about the Kindle line up until now is that I never felt connected to my location in a book.  While it was easy to see my progress through the book as a percentage, it was harder to know how long it’ll be until I finish a chapter and reach a good stopping point.  The Paperwhite fixes that with math!  It watches my reading pace, then predicts how many minutes it’ll be until I finish a chapter.  And so far it’s been pretty accurate.

I still wish the Paperwhite had physical page-turn buttons in the same way the Nook has preserved that option.  But when placed in the optional Kindle case, the Paperwhite’s bezel is very slightly wider than the case on older models.  It’s a small difference, but it makes it much more comfortable to rest my thumb there while reading.

The Paperwhite’s case has a smartcover-style wake feature.  Open it up, and the device unlocks.  Close it, and it re-locks.  This is again a small bonus, but an appreciated one.

Lastly, the negatives:

The Paperwhite has no audio output.  It can’t read the book to you like other models can, and you can’t listen to mp3s on it either.  I don’t think I ever used either of those features, so I don’t mind the loss. But if either are critical to your use, keep it in mind.

The new capacitive screen is great, but it doesn’t work with gloves.  I read at the bus stop every morning, and in the winter this makes it trickier to turn pages.  The older IR touchscreens could be poked with anything, gloved or not.

In conclusion, I feel like the lit screen will be the last major innovation in e-ink readers for a while.  I could be wrong about that, but the Kindle paperwhite feels like a device with the feature list I’ve always wanted.